Tallgrass prairie restoration
Restoration outcomes are notoriously variable, hindering practice and impeding predictive capacities, and we generally lack understanding of the reasons for this variability. Complicating matters is that variation may result from many types of factors, spanning soil conditions, landscape context, details of the restoration methods used, and many others.
To resolve drivers of variation in restoration outcomes, we are working to unite community assembly theory to restoration practice. Our goal is to understand how aspects of seed mixes (e.g., seeding density, diversity), underlying environmental conditions like soils, and other factors work together to structure plant community assembly during prairie restoration. We are pursuing this approach through a combination of mechanism-oriented experiments, which manipulate aspects of seed mix design, and surveys of ongoing prairie restoration efforts across the Upper Midwest.